Their Time is Occupied, But Not Their Brains
By Kirsten Olson,
Author of Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and
Standing Up to Old School Culture

It's the end of the school year, exam
time for school age children. Everywhere around the country
children are studying (and Facebooking and YouTubing, and searching
online while listening to music). Simultaneously.

While most adults support the act
studying for children (teaches them discipline! keeps them off the
streets!), my own three teenage children report they will be doing a
lot of stuff in preparation for final exams that, well, may not be
very meaningful in the long run. Their time is occupied, but not
their brains. They are memorizing 180 irregular verbs tenses,
memorizing Boyle's law, Charles' Theorum, preparing for a 90 item
multiple choice test on Indian independence, memorizing the dates of
the Chinese dynasties, memorizing all the elements in the periodic
table that are soluble.

In education, we increasingly look at
learning in terms of how challenging it is cognitively and
emotionally for kids. These exercises are low level, in some cases,
the lowest level: memorization and comprehension. Although students
do need to spend time some time memorizing some information, it needs
to be connected to bigger, higher level concepts and challenges or
they very quickly forget it. You know that yourself from your own
educational life, and just because you had to do it doesn't
mean it's good educational practice now. It's a general problem,
one that author John Medina, of Brain Rules
(http://www.brainrules.net)
sums up by saying, if you had to design
an environment that was least interesting for the human brain
for learning, it would probably be the classroom!

Why is kids' time occupied by school,
but not turned on in their brains?

Schoolwork isn't designed for the
Google/Bing age. We see learning as something you "get," a product
to be acquired. Real learning isn't like that, and most of what school
asks kids to do is acquire information that can now be accessed on the
internet. What else should school provide? An opportunity to talk over
that information, critique it, and understand it more deeply, said one
high school sophomore recently.

Control isn't motivating.
Controlling kids, particularly middle and high schoolers, isn't
motivating to them. Lots of learning environments are designed, first
and foremost, to control kid's behavior.

Kids get too much negative
feedback on their work, and negative feedback that is too general to be
useful in improving performance. "This was a sloppy essay," is not
as helpful as, "in your first paragraph, you didn't adequately define
your main idea or suggest what the argument here is, and therefore I
didn't have a roadmap for moving through the rest of the paragraphs."
Most feedback on work is very broad and unhelpful. Scantron,
machine-graded tests increasingly used in middle and high school also
don't provide much real feedback on performance, unless you personally
get a lot from knowing where you fall on a bell curve.

You have to sit still too much in
school. It's hard to sit still all day. Few adults do it. We ask
kids to.

You don't get to choose what you
are going to learn most of the day. Choice motivates! Lots of
school assignments, even if they do offer choice, offer false,
superficial ones.

We rely too much on superficial
tests to judge the value of work. An ocean of evidence supports
this, yet we are lining up for more testing.

Most kids don't see the
connection between what they are asked to do in school, and the world
of work they are going to. And they are probably right! A lot of
the connections aren't very clear. Old fashioned ideas of
authority -- doing it because I told you to -- aren't motivating for
this
generation of students, either.

Adults don't listen to kids.
Really listen to them. I observe lots of classrooms where kids are
listened to only when they say things that a teacher wants them to say.
When kids say things that adults don't want to hear, they hardly get an
ear. They may get a detention.

Kids don't have a real say in how
schools are run. Most student government organizations are Potemkin
villages -- students don't really have power to actually change things.

Teachers are overstressed, and
don't have enough time to think carefully about their students. (Or
themselves, or other teachers. ) Schools are often lonely places
for adults! Teachers have little time to talk about their work, or
think about how to do it better. So they often settle into complaining,
which creates more stress. The cycle continues.

Students are grouped together by
age, not by developmental level, or what they know and can do.
Students should be able to in and out, backwards and forwards in groups
according to their levels of mastery, not based on their age. We should
see grouping as aimed at getting kids together for their specific needs
at that moment, then regrouping for the next challenge.

Human brains are growing all
the time. But we don't act like this in school. In fact, we
underchallenge of kids, and don't give them enough to do that is real,
interesting, and important. We don't encourage making mistakes, another
way brains really learn.

We undervalue teachers' work.
Being a great teacher is like being a great brain surgeon: you need
very high level skills, to work on your practice constantly, and be
supported by a great team who watch you and help you do better. We
treat teachers badly, and this rubs off in the classroom.

What do kids want from school? What
they tell me is they want to learn how to be successful, to have
friends, and to have fun. Teachers too. Time for big changes in our
system, before the next exam.

Author BioKirsten Olson, author of Wounded
by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and
Standing Up to Old School Culture, is a writer, educational
consultant, and
national-level Courage To Teach facilitator, and principal of Old Sow
Consulting. She has been a consultant to the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, the Kennedy School at Harvard University, and many large
public school systems and charter schools.